


Let's Find An Out

by sksai



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU (Comics), Young Justice - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Angst with a Happy Ending, Crossover, M/M, Mutual Pining, Normal Powers, Sexual Tension, well not
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 22:48:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18647680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sksai/pseuds/sksai
Summary: I woke up at one in the morning with a fully downloaded outline for a Timkon Pushing Daisies AU. Loosely based. Will not follow the same plot, just a similar set up! No touches allowed. Let's get ready to PINE.





	Let's Find An Out

Conner Kent was no stranger to waking up in hospital beds. 

He blinked up at the familiarly liquid white ceiling tiles, inexplicably pockmarked with useless texture. He never understood why hospital ceilings always looked like that. Was it supposed to be stylish? It was mind numbingly ugly. Or maybe that was just the splitting headache that ripped from the back of his eyelids all the way down his spine, thumping like a heartbeat with every blink of his eyes. He remembered eventually to keep them closed. He experimented with rolling his shoulders back, cracking his neck, and hissed as searing pain shot down his back and yo-yo’d back up to smack into his skull like an expertly aimed bowling ball reducing his once put-together brain to a sprawl of knocked over pins. He tried opening his eyes again. The room spun. 

“You don’t deserve this,” said a voice, a voice as equally familiar as the ugly ceiling tiles above him, and infinitely more aesthetically pleasing, even when it dripped with venom. His senses drawn up tight and hypersensitive, the faint clicking noise that followed this proclamation was like a car backfiring directly into his ear.

He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, took a deep breath, and managed to maneuver his too heavy head to the side so he could open them and stare blearily at his unhappy girlfriend holding what he knew to be the control pad for the morphine drip that was going to solve all his problems momentarily. He smiled weakly as she continued to scowl at him. 

“You wouldn’t let me suffer,” he rasped out, throat dry and itchy from disuse. “Bleh,” He complained childishly. “Water.” 

“Get it yourself,” Cassie quipped, dropping the tube into the white sheets surrounding him. She sounded more pissed off than usual, and Conner made a big show of struggling to sit up and reach for the clear plastic cup of tap water sitting on the propped up tray attached to the side of the bed. He swallowed it down in one laborious, unsatisfying gulp.

“Do I get a sticker?” He handed the empty cup to Cassie, delirious from pain and sleep and the heavy painkiller now pumping through his veins.  Cassie swore, her tone shifting from anger to uncertainty, the hardened scowl on her face melting into a soft frown. 

“You don’t remember what happened, do you?” 

Conner had been referred to on more than one occasion as “ruthless” on the ice, even as Enforcers went. He’d been dumped into little league hockey as soon as he began to grow at an alarming rate and his grandparents didn’t know what else to do with him. He wasn’t very good at hockey, but he was big and strong and reliably durable, and there was something irreplaceably satisfying about speeding through a thick layer of ice, the blades of his skates digging up slush as he barreled himself into opposing players, usually toppling himself over in the process, the burning scrape of ice against raw skin, bloody noses and spitting teeth. Ma was convinced this was the reason they’d grown back in so haphazardly, the top row unevenly spaced out, the bottom twisting at unseemly angles. Conner had seen too many gruesomely cut up lips, and Bart was always complaining about the way the mouthguard never sat quite right in his mouth and the way the metal wrapped around his teeth routinely rubbed the sensitive skin behind his lips raw, so braces were not something he was interested in. Besides, Cassie had assured him that she preferred him this way. 

“You’d look creepy if you got your teeth fixed,” she’d decidedly announced on their third date. “Too perfect.” 

There were tears in her eyes now, and Conner attempted to sober himself, strained to remember what exactly had landed him flat on his back staring up at an ugly ceiling this time. It was—August. The tail end of Summer vacation. Off-season. Memories filtered through his head like a nonsensical dream. Images snapped together like nightmarish puzzle pieces, each one more disturbing than the last. Party. Yelling. Car door. Screeching tires, glass breaking, slicing into his skin, too deep, choking him, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe, and then—blip. It all abruptly came to an all encompassing halt, blackness spotting out his vision until he was surrounded by cold and infinite space. Everything felt wrong, suddenly. Like his skin had been sheared off and badly reapplied. His skeleton dismantled and incorrectly put back together. 

“Conner,” Cassie’s hand on his chest pushed him back down to Earth. “You’re okay. Just breathe.” 

As always, he obeyed her command, and eventually the hand was gone, flicking up to match the other one as she wiped her fingers under her dripping wet bloodshot eyes. 

“This sucks,” she sniffed, crossing her arms defiantly in front of her chest. “I’m not even allowed to be mad at you.” 

“You’re allowed to be mad at me,” Conner said, though something like dread had punctured his lungs. 

“Car accident,” she blurted out unkindly. “You versus tree.” 

“Did I win?” 

“I suppose it was a tie,” she snorted, shook her head, annoyed at falling prey to his wily charm like she always did. “It’s not funny, Conner. You were drunk.” 

“Fuck,” Conner slumped back against the starchy pillow under his head. 

“You could have killed someone,” she said. “You could have died.” 

“We got in a fight,” Conner remembered. 

“You started a fight,” Cassie corrected him. “You were out of your fucking mind.” 

“Thanks for the recap,” his voice came out strangely cold. More pictures unfurled themselves in his head, more painful than the ones before. 

“You were all over Davidson.” 

Cassie scoffed low in her throat. “Of course  _that’s_  what you remember. You were acting psychotic. You were completely wasted. Even your little minion was on my side, for once. He tried to calm you down, he tried to stop you from leaving, but you were almost as mean to him as you are to me. When Tim called to tell him what happened I thought he was going to drop dead right in front of me. You broke his heart.” 

Conner’s blood boiled. Cassie had always been weirdly jealous of Bart, even though he was never anything but nice to her.  _He’s in love with you_ , she used to accuse, when his incessant presence had played too long on her nerves. Her disdain for him was tragically ironic, considering the poor guy had a monster crush on her. Conner had actually supposed to have been wingmaning for his best friend when he started talking to Cassie in Sophomore year, and unfortunately decided he wanted her for himself instead. It wasn’t something they ever discussed, because they were best friends, and dudes, but Conner knew it was probably the worst thing he’d ever done. He didn’t appreciate the very reason his best friend might secretly harbor any negative feelings toward him throwing that in his face right now. 

“Tim?” He asked, blinking wildly around the name, unfamiliar to his ears. 

Cassie sighed. “Drake. Apparently he caught you as you were getting in your truck and tried to stop you as well. When that didn’t work he somehow managed to convince you to at least let him get in the passenger seat. You’re so lucky he’s not hurt. Even if that tree hadn’t managed to finish you off, I’m sure one of his dad’s goons would have stopped by to smother you with a pillow by now.” 

“What the hell are you talking about?” Conner’s brain turned in on itself trying to make sense of the words coming out of his girlfriend’s mouth. “Who is Tim Drake?” 

“Don’t joke,” she warned. Conner stared back at her blankly. 

“You can’t be serious.” She threw up her hands. “Bruce Wayne’s son? He goes to school with us? Has for three years? He sits behind you in homeroom?” 

Conner scrunched up his face, managing to finally come up with an answer to all these questions. “Weird Kid?” 

Cassie looked at him like he’d just sucked her soul out of her ass. “Unbelievable.” 

She didn’t give him time to reply haughtily with the fact that Cassie was the one who’d started calling him that, the skinny boy with owlish eyes that routinely wore thin black gloves and a medical mask to school. No one knew why. No one really cared, either. Bart had been his lab partner last year, and claimed he was perfectly nice and perfectly normal, save for the whole mask and gloves thing. Other than that, the guy was distinctly absent from Conner’s memories. 

Eventually Conner’s grandmother arrived, the click and whoosh of heavy magnetic hospital doors clanging resoundingly with her swift entrance and Cassie’s prompt exit. This was proof positive Cassie was more angry at him than she’d ever been before. Depriving him of morphine and accusing him of psychosis was one thing, leaving him alone with his grandmother after he’d royally fucked up was as good as a break up text. 

But Conner’s grandmother seemed to have been left out of the loop, the loop being that Conner had drunkenly wrapped his grandfather’s priceless vintage truck around a tree. Through staying quiet and feigning fogginess, he was able to piece together that she’d been fed a different story, no more processable than the one Cassie had regaled him with, but at least in this one his underage drinking and driving had been removed from the narrative. She kept referring to the “sweet boy” who’d driven all the way out to the farm in person, because the news that your grandson had been in a near-fatal car accident wasn’t something one ought to hear over the phone. Conner was so thrown by the whiplash of his girlfriend verbally eviscerating him and his much meaner grandmother cooing and kissing at him like he was a helpless baby he’d almost thought the old woman was going senile and didn’t remember his lifelong best friend’s name. It wasn’t until he was dressed and released and finally got said best friend in the flesh that he remembered the mysterious extra player in this half-forgotten drama. 

“I didn’t think you were all that bad,” he shrugged, twisting his lips at Cassie’s version of the story. “I mean, you were being a dick. But you were drunk.” 

“Right,” Conner scoffed humorlessly. “Except apparently I wasn’t. Ma said that was the first thing the paramedics and cops assumed, but my blood-alcohol levels came back clear. How is that possible?” 

Bart just shrugged again. “Maybe you weren’t _that_ drunk. Maybe you were just having a bad night.” 

“Cassie said Weird Kid called you right after it happened, also miraculously unscathed.” 

When Conner had mustered up enough wherewithal to go pee before they left the hospital, he’d been more than prepared for a bruised and bloody pulp version of his face to greet him in the mirror. Even more disturbing than that sight was the one he was actually given, his face utterly unmarred. Nothing to be found anywhere else, either. Not even a scratch. It didn’t make sense. Conner remembered the windshield shattering, the feeling of glass sinking into his throat, ripping through skin and muscles and arteries, choking on his own blood. He’d slumped forward, breathlessly gripping the sink in front of him, the shock of the memory like a dizzying blow to the stomach. It almost undid him to think of it now. He touched idly at his neck, unscarred and good as new, and wondered if he was going crazy. 

“I wouldn’t say Tim got off  _unscathed_ ,” Bart coldly emphasized the last word, but it was the  _Tim_  that seemed to stick out the most. “I mean,” Bart eyed Conner strangely, like he wasn’t quite sure what he was looking at. “Comparatively.”

“Cassie said—” Conner shook his head. “Never mind. What exactly did Weir— _Tim—_ say when he called you?”

Bart’s version of events from there were basically identical to Cassie’s. Tim had tried to stop a visibly drunk Conner from driving off and managed to worm his way into the passenger seat of the vehicle, for whatever reason. This was the bit of the story that made the least sense to Conner. The doctors, the first responders on the scene, the police—all they could talk about was how incredible it was that neither boys had been seriously hurt in the crash. "Touched by an angel," everyone kept saying. Tim was apparently a little scraped up, but nothing too serious. He’d seen the crash coming seconds before it happened and instinctively pulled both their bodies downward, effectively dodging the windshield shattering inward on impact. That must have been how Conner hit his head and was knocked unconscious, and ended up covered in blood, Tim’s blood, before the other boy had stumbled out and called 911. 

Conner could remember the crash vividly now. Still in jumbled pieces, but the images were clear. He saw the headlights of his truck illuminating the tree he knew he was about to smash into, closing his eyes as the glass blew backward, one split second of searing pain, of mortal terror, and then lights out. He couldn’t be sure about the dubious level of intoxication he’d been under, or if the phantom feeling of glass slicing into him was simply a nightmare that had resulted from the trauma of what could have been, had Tim not been there. 

But that was the thing. 

The thing Conner couldn’t wrap his mind around, couldn’t rationalize away, was the achingly heavy knowledge that he’d been alone in his truck that night. He may have been drunk and angry and stupid, but there was no universe that existed in which Conner would have allowed some random stranger—or literally anyone—into his own deranged suicide mission. 

It hadn’t been an accident. 

There were still so many holes in his mind, but his heart was all in one piece, and it remembered, however drunkenly and psychotically the circumstances had been, that a decision had been made. There was no way Tim could have known that, obviously. So his story seemed to check out to everyone else. 

Only Conner knew he was lying. 

But why?

Conner had spent the last three days rifling through the reasons. To seem like a hero or something? To have some kind of dirt on Conner? Because he was just garden variety crazy? 

“Maybe he was, I don’t know,” Bart gave Conner another disinterested shrug when he confided this in him. “Protecting you.” 

“Protecting me?” Conner’s eyebrows shot up. “From what?” 

“Uh, gee, I don’t know,” Bart rolled his eyes. Conner was starting to wonder if Cassie had sunk her claws into him, turning his best friend against him as some kind of petty revenge. “Getting arrested?” 

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Conner rubbed at his aching temples. “He doesn’t even know me.”

“And even if he is lying,” said Bart—

“Which  _he i_ s,” Conner shot back. “That still doesn’t explain how I got his blood all over me, or how he got hurt at all, considering he wasn’t fucking there.” 

Bart’s lips settled into a straight line. 

“You don’t believe me,” Conner accused miserably.

Bart sighed. “Why don’t you just talk to him?” 

Conner stilled. “Talk to who?” 

“The guy who saved your life?” Bart scoffed.  “I’m sure he could clear all this up for you much better than I could.” 

Something had gone very, very wrong three nights ago. In the fragility of a single moment, his life had been upended, and now his girlfriend hated him, and his best friend thought he was crazy, and all he had to show for it was holes in his brain and a permanent pounding headache. 

“Fine,” he sighed, standing up from where he’d been sat on Bart’s bedroom floor. “Point me in Weird Kid’s direction and I’ll shake the truth out of him.” 

“You should probably remember to call him Tim,” Bart grumbled, scribbling a phone number onto a piece of paper and ripping it from his notebook to hand to Conner. “And thank him for saving your life.” 

“Allegedly,” Conner spat. 

Bart didn’t respond with words, just fixed a stony gaze upon Conner that soured the inside of his stomach. He was looking at Conner in a way he’d never looked at him before, and a way that Conner did not care for at all. Like he felt sorry for him. Like for this first time in his life he was happy to be Bart Allen and not Conner Kent. 

 

*******

 

Conner had never considered himself a very duplicitous person. The shadiest thing he’d ever done was steal Cassie out from under Bart’s hapless pursuit of her, and he’d been pretty forthcoming about that as the whole thing had unfolded.  But desperate times called for desperate measures, and since he knew this Tim kid was lying about what had gone down that night, he doubted he’d be all that eager to take Conner up on a casual coffee date anytime soon. 

So instead he passed along the number to his grandmother, his fumbling deception thankfully disguising itself as shyness when he explained that he wanted her to invite Tim over for dinner, and that he felt too embarrassed to do it himself. 

In predictable weirdness, Tim showed up woefully overdressed for the sticky hot swell of late summer in Smallville. He had on a pair of black cuffed jeans so skinny that they made Conner wonder if he had to coat his thighs in baby powder before he slid himself into them. In stark contrast to Conner’s threadbare muscle tee he’d desperately cut the sleeves off of as soon as he started to sweat, Tim’s arms were covered in a thick cranberry colored jumper that hung from his impossibly tiny frame like a curtain, so much so that it dragged to one side, exposing a startling amount of milk white collarbone. The most surprising thing that had been left uncovered was the bottom half of his face, which Conner promptly realized he’d never actually seen before. For some reason, standing on the porch as the sun went down behind him, Conner faltered on the belief that this person was the same Weird Kid that had sat behind him in homeroom the last three years of his life. Thick black hair that swooped into soft waves under his ears, bruisey deep set eyes, a long straight nose and rose petal pink lips, he looked nothing like the picture of a greasy loser Conner had mentally stored away in his mind and more like a horny teenage girl’s heavily stylized Kylo Ren fanart. 

“Conner!” Pa came up from behind him, smacking his concussed head so hard he saw stars. “Don’t just stand there catching flies, invite the boy inside.” 

This was a fitting prelude to the rest of dinner, which consisted mostly of his grandparents fawning over Tim, Ma tutting over the yellowing bruise around one of his eyes, Pa going absolutely buck wild over the cherry and rhubarb pie he’d brought with him. 

“Just look at that lattice,” he all but drooled, tapping the sugar coated crust with his fork. He then pointed a forkful of red goo at Tim. “What I’d give for nimble little fingers like those.” 

_My grandpa is trying to fuck Weird Kid_ , Conner texted under the table to Cassie. She did not reply. 

Still mad. Whatever. He’d deal with that later. He was still waiting for the proverbial iron to heat up so he could strike. His chance finally came when Ma and Pa had retired to the living room and Tim had—of course—offered to do the washing up. 

Conner pretending to be in the middle of a lengthy conversation as he simply typed sakjhdslgkjhlkgjhfdlgkjfhdgjkhljkhfgjdh;ldfh asd ;lkfgdfjs l;gsuhjkfg;alfhk in an empty text box to Bart before making his move. His heart was hammering in his chest as he idled in the kitchen doorway, all at once inexplicably nervous. He needed answers and he was terrified of the truth. It was like he knew deep down whatever Tim was going to say was going to irrevocably ruin his life. 

A squeaky yelp from Krypto pulled him from his spiraling thoughts and he frowned at the sight of Tim knelt down, scratching his happily panting slutty dog behind the ears. 

“Didn’t peg you as an animal lover,” Conner relished silently in the way Tim’s shoulders jerked upward in surprise. 

He turned to look up at Conner, still on his knees, and visibly unbothered. “No?” 

“Aren’t you, like, a germaphobe or whatever?” 

Tim’s caterpillar eyebrows knitted together curiously. “What?” 

“The mask,” Conner reminded him, suddenly worried he was like the boy wearing the cape to school in Boy Meets World who refused to admit he was wearing a cape to school. “The gloves?” 

“Oh,” Tim looked genuinely taken aback, like he was surprised Conner had noticed this extremely weird and noticeable thing about him. “I work part-time at the GCPD, assisting the medical examiner. I go in before school, and go back during lunch, and when I first started I was so bad at remembering I had a second shift, so I started leaving my stuff on so I wouldn’t forget. I guess it just became habit after awhile.” 

“Oh,” It was Conner’s turn to be thrown off balance. “Wait, so like, you come to school with the gloves you’ve touched dead bodies with?” 

Tim’s porcelain skin went a bit sickly sallow at that. He swallowed thickly, his already prominent Adam’s apple bobbing threateningly in his throat. His cloudy gray eyes held Conner’s for a long uncomfortable stretch of time, flicked down to his chest, and back up again. 

“Nice shirt.” 

“Huh? Oh.” It was such an aggressive shift in direction Conner couldn’t help but momentarily fall for it. He glanced down self-consciously at the black shirt that read in white block letters: NATURAL 20. “I think Bart got this for me like, two birthdays ago. It’s like a joke from—”

“I know what it’s from,” said Tim, standing up like he’d been challenged, and Conner’s patience with him withered once more. 

“Why did you lie?” 

Tim stared unblinking back at him. “Pardon?” 

“I’ve been losing my mind for the past three days, dude. I’m fucking over it. My girlfriend hates me and my best friend looks at me like he doesn’t know who I am. I don’t know what the hell happened that night. But the only thing I know for sure is that you weren’t fucking there. So why did you tell everyone you were? How the fuck did I get your blood on me? Is that black eye even real—”

“Don’t touch me!” Tim jerked away from Conner so violently, he backed himself into the sink and elbowed a drying glass off the drying rack, and it crashed to the floor. Krypto barked in alarm, and Conner rushed to hold him back from stepping in the shards of broken glass sprayed across the floor like an idiot. 

“Conner?” Ma appeared in the doorway, a concerned questioning look on her face. “Everything all right?” 

“I’m sorry,” Tim was kneeling again, scooping the broken glass up with his bare fucking hands. “I dropped a glass while I was cleaning it.” 

“Spooked Krypto.” Conner offered up uselessly. 

“Oh honey,” Ma shooed Tim away from the mess. “Don’t do that. I’ll get a broom…” she trailed off, glancing once at Conner and then up at the clock that hung to the wall above the kitchen sink. “It’s getting late. Conner, why don’t you walk your friend out to his car? City folks aren’t used to how dark it gets out here.” 

_He’s not my friend,_  Conner had to bite his tongue to stop himself from sneering. Instead both boys obeyed Ma’s command thinly veiled as a suggestion in silence, and Conner had resigned himself to the fact that his plan had been a resounding failure as the screech of cicadas mocked him all the way to Tim’s stupidly sleek black Toyota Avalon that looked like it had been photoshopped into the gravel driveway of the Kent farm. 

“Sorry,” Conner blurted out insincerely. “For freaking out on you back there. I guess I really am losing it.” 

“No,” Tim said, in such a strange voice Conner genuinely didn’t know what he was responding to, before he eventually added. “You’re not losing it. You’re right. The story I fed the cops and your friends wasn’t true. I made it up.” 

It was the exact thing Conner had been waiting to hear, and yet now as he was receiving it, he wanted to rewind time, put his hands over Tim’s mouth to stop him from going on to say what the pit of Conner’s stomach already knew. 

“So, you weren’t in the truck with me?” Conner asked, stupidly. 

Tim shook his head. “I’d been walking home from work when I saw the crash. And then I had to come up with something fast, so my story wasn’t as airtight as it could have been.”

 It was hard to tell in the dark, but Conner could have sworn there was something disturbingly amused in Tim’s expression.

 “I staged the scene so it would really seem like I’d been in the truck with you.” 

Conner watched in silent horror as the silhouette of Tim’s shoulders shrugged. 

“Pretty neat job, all things considered. The cops bought it, after all.” 

But why? Conner was so unready to hear this that the word that came out of his mouth instead was, “How?” 

Tim sighed, rattling off this information like he was reading aloud from a math textbook. “I got in the passenger seat and slammed my head as hard as I could against the dashboard. I was worried about any bruising being obviously from multiple impacts, so I had to make the first one count. There was so much blood. My only option was to tell the cops it was mine. I used my pen knife to scrape up my chest, told them it was from being caught by the seatbelt, and I used some of the broken glass pieces and rubbed as much as I could of it into my arms. I switched the samples at the PD so it would look like it was really all my blood.” 

“What the fuck,” Conner hissed, bringing his hands up to his face. Breathe. He had to remember to breathe. “What the fuck, man. Just tell me why.” 

“You were dead.” Tim wasn’t one for peeling band-aids off slowly. “A large piece of glass from the windshield was stuck nearly completely through your neck. I almost didn’t want to pull it out, I was scared your head was going to fall off.” 

Conner laughed. He had to. What else were you supposed to do when someone says something like that? The memories he’d played off as nightmares, the feeling of choking on his own blood, the cold, cold, blackness of…dying. It had really happened. All of it. Every insane thought his scattered brain had come up with in the past three days had been true.

“Okay,” he scoffed, wanting this to just be over. There was only one missing piece of the puzzle left. “So I was dead. What am I now?” 

“Alive,” Tim answered simply. 

“And how did you manage that one, Copperfield?” 

Tim sighed again, looked around agitatedly. “Can we talk about this somewhere else?” 

Conner stood his ground, pretending to be angry and not terrified of this boy half his size. 

“Not just no,” he said. “But fuck no. You just told me you  _rubbed glas_ s into your _arms,_ man.” A stray thought spilled into him. “Are you some kind of superhuman that doesn’t feel pain?” 

“No,” Tim answered in the same plain voice, seemingly unaffected by Conner’s cold disposition. “It hurt, but,” he shrugged again, like that was all there was to say. 

“It’s hard to explain,” He looked, of all things, embarrassed. 

“Harder than telling me my head almost fell off?” 

“You’re not the first person I’ve brought back to life,” he spoke quickly, quietly, finally as eager as Conner for this conversation to end. “That’s what I actually do at the police department. Resurrect victims so we can question them about how they died.” 

“That’s.” Conner’s brain was on fire. “You can’t—just bring people back to life.” 

“No,” Tim agreed. “You can’t. That’s why I have to kill them again after we’re done.” 

“Oh, good.” Conner was more or less hysterical at this point. “I was wondering when it would get better.” 

“The universe doesn’t like it when you fuck with its hard work. If I leave someone alive for too long after I’ve revived them, someone else has to die.” 

“Who?” 

“It’s random. Usually someone physically close by.” 

“Jesus fucking Christ. Alright. So why am I still up and running, then?” 

“To be perfectly honest,” said Tim. “It was kind of an accident. I didn’t plan to keep you alive.” 

“Don’t make me blush now.” 

“I don’t know,” Tim was the one who sounded afraid now. “This is new territory for me. I don’t know what the longterm consequences of letting you live will be. I’m sorry for interfering in the first place. I acted without thinking, and then you were alive again, and I just couldn’t—” He cut himself off abruptly, shaking his head free of whatever nasty thought had just come to him. “I just couldn’t do it.” 

“That’s why I was covered in blood with no wounds,” Conner surmised numbly. “And why no alcohol showed up in my system.” 

“Yep,” Tim agreed easily. “Fresh start.” 

“How do you do it?” Conner didn’t want to but had to know. “Bring people back to life?” He couldn’t believe the words coming out his mouth, that he was entertaining this absurd conversation right now. 

One of Tim’s long skinny arms extended in the dark, pressing his index finger up against the window of his car. 

“One touch, alive again. And if I leave someone or something alive for too long, then someone or something else has to die. Another touch, dead again. Forever.” 

Conner was mortified it had taken this long for the most unsettling part of this to sink in. 

“Wait. So—How long is too long?" 

"Anything over 60 seconds is my running estimate."

Conner's blood froze in his newly and apparently too-long reanimated veins. "That means someone else died in my place?” 

“Most likely,” Tim said. “Sometimes it’s an animal, if there’s a big enough one around. But it’s usually something of equal…” He seemed to struggle to find the right word. “Value.” 

“Who was it?” Conner’s heart all but stopped in his chest. “Who died because of me?” 

Tim turned to him, an unexpected shock of purpose lighting up his features. “Because of  _me_. I’m the one who messed with the natural balance of the universe, not you.” 

“Right,” Conner had to agree. “On account of me being dead.” 

“I don’t know,” Tim answered after a moment of silence. “Like I said, it’s random. But it’s not like it’s anything anyone would find all that strange. People die every day. Maybe some sleaze-bag keeled over in the street. Or a very elderly person went peacefully in their sleep. That’s all you can hope for, anyway.” 

“So if you touched me again,” Conner’s mind was already onto bigger and better things. 

“You’d die,” Tim finished for him. “No take backs this time.” 

“Is that why you came here?” Another thing Conner couldn’t believe it had taken him this long to realize. “To finish the job?” 

Tim laughed, actually laughed, like that was genuinely funny to him. “No. I came here because your grandmother invited me.” 

“She didn’t, really,” Conner found a strange sense of satisfaction in revealing this to Tim. “I knew the story about you being in the truck with me was bullshit as soon as I heard it. I needed to get the truth out of you and I knew there was no way I could get you to come anywhere near me if I tried fishing for it myself. But one doesn’t just say ‘no’ to my grandma.” 

“A-Plus,” Tim hissed mirthlessly through his teeth. “Can I go now?” 

Conner was at a loss for words. An indiscernible amount of time ticked by. Ma was probably wondering what the fuck was going on out here. He needed to get back inside before she got too suspicious. 

“What am I supposed to do now?” Conner asked. “Am I like a zombie or something? Am I gonna be seventeen forever, Edward Cullen style?” 

“As far as I can tell,” Tim finally opened the door to his car, the light from inside casting him suddenly in a stark, otherworldly glow. “The rest of your life should go on as normally as it would have otherwise. Just keep your mouth shut,” he leveled Conner with a gaze so black it stood up the hairs on the back of his neck. “And stay away as far away from me as humanly possible.” 

Conner remained standing there, frozen to the spot, watching numbly Tim's dark car melt away into the night as he peeled out of driveway and sped off. He had all the answers he'd been so desperately searching for. The holes in his brain now spackled over and waiting for a fresh coat of paint. Somehow, he only felt more at a loss. He had no idea what to make of Weird Kid Tim Drake, part-time necromancer. He'd been quiet and aloof, then forthright and compassionate, then flipped off like a light switch. Cold, calculating. Freaking Conner out with the graphic description of his previously dead body and then essentially telling him to get over it and fuck off. Which one was the real Tim? Was there a real Tim in there at all? Or had a lifetime of having such a fucked up force at his fingertips bled him dry of too weighty concepts, like humanity? If Conner didn't have much, much bigger problems to worry about, he might have actually cared to find out. The guy had saved his life, after all. More than saved. Literally given it back to him after it had already been gone. That kind of tied them together in a very strange and unpleasant way that he didn't think either of them really had a say in.

But whatever. As far away as humanly possible. Conner, who did not have any interest in dying again any time soon, would be more than happy to follow this one very simple rule. 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Hello timkon shippers! Welcome to the terrordome. Hello lost TRC fans who are subscribed to me and wandered into this fic and are scared and upset. I'm working on a big update for JTBQ so don't you worry. But to anyone who might still be reading this, My partner and I, two hustlin disabled gals, are going through an extremely rough time right now, you can read more about it in this post:
> 
> https://billybonez.tumblr.com/post/184413287081/billybonez-so-due-to-personal-reasons-the-next 
> 
> if you're curious, my ko-fi and venmo links are in there if you feel like it. <3


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